the slate sheds some interesting light on Copyright and why youTube might be in less trouble than everybody claimed.
The nice people at fxguide were brave enough to record my incoherent ramblings and put them up as a podcast. Luckily Angus Wall and Jeff Heuser were in the same podcast. They added sense and reason and made it so worth listening to.
The Republicans assured that the US had the worst possible start into the century. Unfortunately people like Kerry and Kennedy are not exactly inspiring. But now Barack Obama considers to run . Perfect. I only heard him speak once. But he can talk. The next thing I could wish for is a campaign that would cut through all that mess. If only 5% of the people wake up and become active for what they care for that would already be enough to get some leadership back in the Whitehouse.
Bush claiming he never has ‘been stay the course’
The only question is why such a person was able run the largest power on this planet for eight years.
Seriously.
"What a mighty man he turns out to be! He raped 10 women - I would never have expected this from him. He surprised us all - we all envy him!"
Vladimir Puttin about the President of Israel. According to the BBC
That men can talk pretty outragous bulshit is not really news. What does bother me is the attitude of Putin (According Ze Frank ‘Putin’ is the approiate word for a baby fart) and alikes that run around and try to represent moral values. While they actually are just as bad as your common average guy.
Surprisingly little attention goes into the fact that most computer installation run 24/7 and use power that needs to be bought. Electricity bills are often perceived like taxes or any other act of god: An expense needed in order to do business. As long the competition get’s hit as well, what’s there to think about?
Well.
The ‘digital negative’ of the movie we just finished was 140 Terrabytes. That got me thinking: what if we would have tried to keep it all online. The installation of those disks would have used 8,750 Watts. Double that for cooling and you would have spent 16,863 US dollar to keep all those spindles spinning for a year. (at 11 cents a KW/h).
That does matter in my book. Since I can never remember anything I thought I would try to come up with a approximation of cost per 1000 Watts. It looks as if realities don’t get bent too much when assuming 80 US$ per 1KW per month, or 1000 US$ per year. Double that if you have to cool the room the machines live in. Which is always the case. The variables here are the efficiency on the cooling and the actual price not being 11cents. Actuall and nominal Wattage might also differ. But close numbers are better than no numbers, or numbers that are so complex to calculate that they never be taken into account.
Some misc links:
the usual Sony drama around shipments of the PS3.
Cinemas dragging their feet and having generally no vision nor clue. I guess that if you business model is to sell thousands and thousands of tons of pop corn it can not really have a great influence on your creative mindset. Cinema operators probably see themselves more like hog farmers. It’s all about the logistics of getting the corn to the mouths.
Vanessa Williams says HD is not her friend. sqrt(pixelcount) + age of actress * secret Hollywood factor = constant
of course I had to watch another TED video while I was at Google Video. Since it’s such a long way there.
Barry Schwartz talks about choice
I agree with him that the choice is by no means linear to happyness. But I dissagree on his remedy. It’s not a decrease of choice that would be the ideal solution. It’s the management of it. People are not in a situation to make decent and educated descissions. Like mine how to spell certain words for instance. But when people are looking into the options and only choose what makes sense, then all the rubbish will disappear. If you buy crap, or equally worse, let your friends buy crap then you inititate the production of more of it. If you only choose things that are good, then you will steer things in the right direction. The choices will follow.
There are so many junk things around us, since people can survive their wrong choices. So they keep making bad ones.
And finally:
Dan Gilbert about happiness and choice
a quick demo of a multi finger touch interface
Make sure to have alook at the image organisation application he shows around 3:40 before you click away.
There are lots of other TED demo’s online. This is -I believe- the first year that they publish these presentations. Worth the browse.
Can we please make sure that the next President and Administration at least have some basic understanding of something like this?
Please imagine GW Bush looking at a website like the one above. How long could he look at it? How would he describe what he saw to somebody else?
This is the guy supposed to run stuff for 300 Million people in all the things where there needs to be somebody running things. Like war and peace and the financial future of the government.
It seems that America has issues with interlect and clarity, as some links might illustrate:
A democrat activist site has an analytical look a CNNs front page in 2000 and 2006.
The GOP is doing the old Terror trick. They were in power for five years after 9/11. Spent billions on war, yet were unable to get OBL. That’s why you NEED TO VOTE for THEM. Amazing that there seems to be an audience going for that.
Politics, always have been messy and partizan. Let’s switch to technology. There never have been any Mac Viruses. I know of a couple of hundret Apple users, or know the people that are responsible for them. The users are a very mixed crowd. Nobody had ever a Virus or malware issue. You get spam email on a Mac too, your google search results are at times full of spam, but that’s where the malware drama ends for you. It is as simple and as clear cut as that.
Still people write articles like this. There are no factual obvious blunders in this. Except that this blurry mixed bag of facts, statements and quotes seem to hover around this bogus theory of market share. This article exists so that people that benefit from it can point to it and say “Look, Mac’s have viruses too”.
If there is an obvious outbreak of stupidity it causes sometimes a clear response.
But generally it seems to cheap and easy to generate messages and ‘news’ that everybody does it. And most people have an agenda to push. The average american is surrounded by communication that is all meant to pull him in one direction or another. People simply give up on having an opinion that is based on facts. They just swim in a pile of soundbytes and pick whatever seems approiate in the current moment. That’s probably why politicians get away with all the crap that they are coming up with.
It was not always like that: In the age of reason there was an attempt to know things. There were discussions, and a quest to find the best solution based on as much objective findings as people would get a handle on. I am sure there were snake oil merchants back in the day as well. I want to believe though, that it was clear and simple that these people were peddling there goods and had no part on a serious discussions about serious matters. OK, maybe I have a slitghly idealized perspective on a world in that the American Constitution has been created.